Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

storagedude writes "Google could go the way of the dodo if ultra intelligent electronic agents (UIEA) make their way into the mainstream, according to technology prognosticator Daniel Burrus. Siri is just the first example of how a UIEA could end search as we know it. By leveraging the cloud and supercomputing capabilities, Siri uses natural language search to circumvent the entire Google process. If Burrus is right, we'll no longer have to wade through '30,000,000 returns in .0013 milliseconds' of irrelevant search results."

It seems like the real question is, "Will searching the Internet become less useful in the future, when people have small personal chochkies that know all of their personal preferences, their habits, location and can give them exactly what they want, instead of 400 things that might be, interspersed with dozens of ads."

Even though Siri needs a search engine to work, it basically commoditizes Google/Yahoo/Bing-type services. I suspect this is why Goog's happy to expend astounding amounts of energy and money to keep Android on phones.

"Will searching the Internet become less useful in the future, when people have small personal chochkies that know all of their personal preferences, their habits, location and can give them exactly what they want, instead of 400 things that might be, interspersed with dozens of ads."

If you use Google Search while logged in with a Google account they're doing the same thing for you.

The difference between Siri and what this author is referencing as "Google" is query entry by voice or query entry by keyboard.

It doesn't really have anything to do with the voice entry, that's sort of a red herring. The real issue is wether mobile device makers will be able to use the fact that they live in their customers pockets to give themselves an upper hand over search engines and Big Data.

From their GPS receivers, cameras, and gyroscopes, and then they correlate it with whatever information on the internet they choose, be it Google, Yahoo, Bing, OpenStreetMap, Wolfram, Yelp... The point is they decide the provider, not Google.

It doesn't really have anything to do with the voice entry, that's sort of a red herring. The real issue is wether mobile device makers will be able to use the fact that they live in their customers pockets to give themselves an upper hand over search engines and Big Data.

And the answer is no, since mobile device makers need Big Data -- and much of the technology underlying search engines -- to actually use the fact that they live in their customers pockets to do anything productive.

On the other hand, when I want a restaurant review, I want Yelp or something like Yelp. And when I ask Siri for restaurants, it gives me Yelp reviews. Google for some reason doesn't do this, and the results it does give for these kinds of searches are usually very disorganized and uncurated. I don't care if Siri is hardcoded to go to Yelp, it simply does the right thing and wins, while Google searches spit out a lot of stuff that's useful and a lot of stuff that isn't.

On the other hand, when I want a restaurant review, I want Yelp or something like Yelp. And when I ask Siri for restaurants, it gives me Yelp reviews. Google for some reason doesn't do this

When I ask Google for restaurant reviews, the top results are Zagat, Urbanspoon, and then local restuarants with Google reviews. And then Yelp. I suppose if I specifically wanted Yelp reviews rather than "something like Yelp", I would ask for Yelp.

And I suppose if I actually wanted Yelp (a preference I would reveal to Goo

Alternatively, it's been approximately a decade since I went past the first page of google results. Siri basically gives you the same result as "I'm feeling lucky," but we don't actually want google.com to hide all of the second-run results.

the cherry-picking to which he's referring is not done by Siri, it's by the original poster in choosing that example.

By the way, the answer that *I* get from Siri on that is "This might answer your question: (data not available)". I like Siri a lot and use it every day, but come on. It ain't that smart. And in many places outside the US its usefulness drops off markedly. If I ask it for a place to eat, for instance, it says "Sorry Pete, I can't look for restaurants there."

For me, google has got progressively worse in the last year or so. It treats everything i write as a typo and all words as optional by default. Just yesterday i got 0 relevant results on the first page (query: insync uninstall osx).And I don't get this natural language thing at all - i find it much easier and faster to type two-three words (google *used to* give me relevant results) than to form full sentence. Speaking with a computer is even more cumbersome and a sentence takes even more time than typing a couple of words even if the computer gets it right.But maybe i am just becoming obsolete and google is not meant for searching obscure commands or error messages at all.

The difference between Siri and what this author is referencing as "Google" is query entry by voice or query entry by keyboard.

There is a far more important difference. Google is not getting the opportunity to display the search results, Apple is filtering and doing the presentation, so Google is not getting a chance to display ads.

This is *critical* because ads are Google's lifeblood. Search, email, social, etc... they are just vehicles to deliver targeted ads. Google is a targeted advertising company and filters like Siri threaten their core business.

The comparison between Google and Siri is not as silly as it appears. Burrus thinks that the future of search belongs to intelligent agents, and that means more than just giving a dumb search engine a little bit of extra context in the form of personal data it has collected on you. Intelligence doesn't mean having data on where I am and what my friends "liked".

An "intelligent" agent (best to use the word with caution) should at the very least:
- understand your question;
- understand the material it is searching.
Google only does this at a very basic level, and in some cases Siri is ahead of the curve when it comes to semantic interpretation. Or more accurately: wolphram alpha is, when Siri passes your question on to it.

There's some nice research going on in semantic analysis of search queries and source material, and ways of turning that into a sematic drill-down into search results. That can come in the form of a visualisation of search results, or (in the future) something like this:
"Siri, I need a new washer"
- "Do you mean dishwasher, or laundry machine, or something else?"
"A laundry machine"
- "What features are you looking for? Low price, economy, capacity, quality, high-speed spin drying?"
"Well, the price is not that relevant though I want something from a reputable brand, and spend at most $800. I suppose most machines will have sufficient capacity."
- "I am assuming a standard-size machine. I found the following A-brand machines matching your criteria, along with prices and features. I highlighted a few machines that people seem to be particularly pleased with."
"Nr. 3 looks good, show me some reviews from trade magazines for that one, as well as what people have written about it. Is there a shop at the local Mega Mall that has them?"
- "Hang on. Yes, it is in stock. You can pick it up but they also do free delivery to this area".

And so on. For this, the search engine needs to understand many things: that there are kinds of "washers", that they have specific properties that may or may not be relevant, that there is a standard size for washing machines, what a "reputable brand" is and which brands qualify, and it needs to be able to interpret shop websites to figure out if they carry a particular model, what their price is, and if they deliver. Google does none of this. Wolphram alpha has some capabilities in this area (type in "dishwasher properties" for example). In the future, when these engines become better at interpreting meaning, we will have conversations with our search engine. That will be the game-changer, and something that could render Google obsolete (if they don;t get into the game themselves).

I've used siri a few times on my wife's iphone but it seems to have a lot of trouble understanding me (and others who have a go). I'm in australia so maybe different accents pose a problem (in which case there should be opportunity to "train" her).

Its also mostly a novelty at the moment - "hey lets see what siri says about this"...

I do think siri has real-world potential though, and wont be disappearing any time soon.

As a personal assistant, siri is great. Setting reminders, doing math, navigation (can she do navigation?) - these are all very useful.

I really dont think siri will replace Google. Siri is not a replacement for search technology and AFAIK contains no new technology for search. Therefore, the article is wrong in saying we wont get hundreds of irrelevant search results. I'd say we'll get the same search results but they'll be spoken instead of "written".

Google now knows my IP. It used to be that if you googled "what is my ip" you had to go to a site that was at the top of the search results. Now the Google answers it for you, god knows how, it must be magic!

Same with conversions, phrase it in natural language and Google answers it for you, rather then forcing you to find a conversion site.

BUT these things are easy. Answering: gosh like I need to knows the thingy for my thingy so I can do thingy... that is a bit harder. It can tell me what my IP is because it knows what I mean with IP. IF however I was a lame artist and was asking what Intellectual Property belonged to me, I could go very confused by thinking those digits belonged to me.

What is stockprice X doing is easy. As long as you can regonize "stockprize" and the ticket ID, you got a simple search. But people don't often search like that outside of commercials. Who cares what the stock price is doing. Most people don't have stocks.

The real problem with search is that A: People often don't know what they are searching for and B: scammers want to get people to visit their website regardless of relevance.

Take "review". It is a nearly useless term to search for when looking for a review. Most sites that come up don't even have a revue. Then their are the endless link spammers so that if you combine search terms, they just show up because they have links to all the terms but not related. "Linux squeezebox" should NOT find pages that discuss a Linux distro and link to a boombox ad. But they do.

And SIRI isn't any better at it. Apart from the fact that it often doesn't understand what you are saying, it also can't combine languages. As a dutch person, I am used to use english for the produkt but dutch for "price/prijs" so that I get the product but with dutch sellers. It often works, SIRI can't grasp the concept.

If search is going to improve, we need a company that is going to brutally cull pages that break searches. All the link farms, GONE. Simply not indexed. Any review site, each review page ONLY carries one keyword, the product reviewed, not indexed for all the other link spam. No review yet available for this product? Then it MUST carry the keyword "NO_REVIEW".

And that is never going to happen because keywords WERE invented to accomplish this and they just became a spammers tool. Google is a spammers tool and the moment another search engine becomes a worthy SEO target, it too will become a spammers tool.

The only way to solve it is to let humans review each found site and brutally cull it. A single keyword wrong? A single suspect link? BANNED, the entire domain, for at least a year. Only then might SEO die.

why would people create textual content if all ad revenue is circumvented by Siri.

Back in 2000, when the default business model was to create content and package it either in a box (like for encyclopedia,...) or stick it behind a paywall. People would have asked the question: "why would people create content if you can find for free on the internet".

Today we know, and tomorrow there will be other business models that work with Siri...

Voice recognition is at it limits phonetically, really it has been since the late 90's. The perceived improvements come entirely from context sensitive assumptions. Siri was better than Google Voice and search for the first 90 days or so due to more brute force behind the context engine. They pulled the CPU allocation at Apple and it has been behind Google Voice ever since.

A Pentium II 450 Mhz running Dragon Naturally Speaking on XP circa 1999 interprets your voice just as well as Google Voice or Siri (given similar microphones / adc's), the difference has entirely been in the guesses the software makes when it doubts recognition of a word within a phrase. A propagation of high quality mics and adc's into phones versus a crap Labtec mics on 90's era PC's constitutes the rest of the difference.

Context interpretation requires an enormous database of phrase fragment search capabilities. Providing better search results is merely the act of making better command keyword extrapolation. E.g., "I want to go to," and going straight to a map to the (nearest current GPS), rather than requiring a structured query such as, "Map to near "

There is no real intelligence or revolution being discussed here, it is rather all the correct application of large amounts of brute force processing power. It all comes down to an extension of the system which made Google #1 over Altavista and Hotbot back in the day, that is processing power driven context sensitivity as opposed to pure keyword frequency.

The only revolution is the linear improvement of CPU power/RAM/storage per $ which makes it affordable to do for free or cheap.

I don't fully agree. Dragon requires extensive training and gets better over time the more you use it and as you actively configure macros, correct misinterpreted words, etc. Siri, google voice search, etc are speaker agnostic. That's a huge difference in technology.

As someone who is currently studying probabilistic modelling-- you're wrong about these systems needing databases of phrases. While they could use that approach, it is not clear that it would help, and searching that database would likely be very inefficient.

Instead, speech/text/image recognition systems typically use some kind of probabilistic graphical model. A simple example of one is called a "Markov chain"-- simple enough that Markov was able to compute conditional probabilities by hand using his mo

Sorry, but this is bull. Your statement that "voice recognition is at its limits phonetically" is just wrong. I work in the voice recognition industry, and in the past five years, I've seen the recognition error rate markedly and measurably go down, and this trend is continuing.

There are actually two kinds of models involved in voice recognition:

1) the acoustic model (which has to do with looking at a sequence of time slices of the acoustic signal and working out what sequence of phonemes could most likely have given rise to it). You say that voice recognition is at its limits phonetically, but these models are actually getting better over time with larger sets of training data, and the improved models measurably result in a lowered word error rate.

2) the language model (which has to do with specifying which words exist, and in what order they are most likely to occur). These language models can be very simple, as in the case of a yes/no question in a phone-based app (your model might accept "yes" and "yes ma'am", but not any arbitrary English utterance); or they can be very large, as in the case of a general-purpose dictation application.

In conjunction with the recognizer, what these two models give you is a raw string of recognized words. What sort of processing you do on that string is a separate question. There are obviously all sorts of things you can do with the string. The parsing and processing techniques are getting more sophisticated, and are getting integrated with other systems in interesting ways. This is largely a separate question from the accuracy of the string itself, which is the output of the recognizer (I say "largely" because your application might activate a different language model based on the current context, which does affect recognition accuracy).

Siri "circumvents" Google search for certain things. "Find me a seafood restaurant" will go to Yelp, which has reviews and such. "How many grams in an ounce" will go to Wolfram-Alpha. Otherwise, it sticks it in a query and ships it off to Google.

Needless to say, Google isn't sitting still. "Find me a seafood restaurant" in Google will also provide me a list of local restaurants with reviews, much like Yelp does. Arguably, Google's ratings may be better because they are collected from a broad spectrum of sources (user reviews from various review sites, individual bloggers, professional reviews) versus whoever Apple decided to sign a deal with. Speaking of which, you have to consider what kind of deals are being done in the background. Woz recently pointed out something [pcmag.com] I found a bit disturbing:

“I used to ask Siri, ‘What are the five biggest lakes in California?’ and it would come back with the answer. Now it just misses. It gives me real estate listings. I used to ask, ‘What are the prime numbers greater than 87?’ and it would answer. Now instead of getting prime numbers, I get listings for prime rib, or prime real estate.”

Forget about leveraging the cloud, AI, all of the wonder of Siri that nobody else has (or some portion of myopic Apple users think nobody else has). Asking Siri something and search by typing a field in a bar are both... search. What looks different is that Siri can take advantage of the semantic web and similar things to read the result to you, and come close to actually understanding what it's doing. But text search can have all of that understanding too.

So as I ask directions from Siri, it may inform me that there's a 25% sale going on at a store in route of my final destination. So rather than looking at 'shiny', it tells me where and when to look for 'shiny' for me.. Nice!

What happens if the sale is merely near the route? Do the instruction get altered to make me pass as many advertisers as possible? Because "nice" is not the word I'd use for such things.

Right. As you and the other two have reminded me, this should have been "The search engine companies can't put their ads in there without paying Apple". And you can imagine that any constraints and regulation that are put on Google will make their way to Apple eventually. Will this protect the users? Absolutely not. Nothing can protect Apple users, because the problem is protecting them from themselves.

"What car should I buy?""You will buy a Ford.""Will?! I hate those! You know, Found On Road Dead.""No. You WILL buy a Ford.""Why?""Because you will be arrested for buying anything else.""What does THAT mean?""You are on Main Street, 734 Main or thereabouts within a 100 foot margin, near the Walmart block. Authorities have been alerted that if your credit card shows any other purchase of a motor vehicle other than Ford, you will be deemed a terrorist and treate

The difference is Siri gives you the answer to your question if it can.
Regular search gives you a list of web pages that may or may not have any relevance.

You're not keeping up. Go on google and type "UA 647". You will see the flight status, properly formatted, right at the top. There are a significant number of questions that are answered this way, and it will only increase.

We know that Google already has mature speech-to-text software, it's on every Android device (and lots of other places, I guess). It doesn't seem to me that they would have a problem catching up with the expert system provided by Siri or Wolfram Research.

I can then change that to "544" by changing three characters or make any other modifications to my query. Google doesn't need to remember to the context on the server side because it provides it in the search box. I don't have to repeat myself like I would with voice.

I don't follow much of the esoteric details (and don't give a yayhoo about speed) but when I enter a term in a search engine, i.e. "RF video combiners," I'd like some return of technical documents and (what would be really nice) individual techies with their own webpage showing how to implement and what pitfalls to avoid. Instead I get a bunch of sales/marketing aggregates, tech discussions that are really disguised sales/marketing crap, ebay listings, go-get-bids, sorority-sluts, etc.

Google has fairly simplistic regex rules to speed the process. I'd happily pay Google $5, $10 or more a month if I could generate a search with complicated regex and weightings. The fee goes to hosting separate servers that specialize in providing truly useful returns in minutes rather than a ream of butt useless ones in a fraction of a second.

Sort of true, I do find myself increasingly annoyed that the terms that are implied to be found increasingly bear no resemblance to the target page but even at its best Google required fairly exact strings. Looking for XXYYZZ234 model number is fine. Looking for more complex strings from stack traces (for bug tracking), formulas or odd context from technical papers has always been clumsy.

The core problem with search engines right now is that they search just for plain text not entities, so whenever a text string shows up in a webpage that matches, you get that as a result, even so that text string happens to refer to a completely different entity. Some search engines such as DuckduckGo or WolframAlpha do have some support for enties, but they are extremely limited and essentially useless for actual search. So if you type in "Saturn" into DuckduckGo, you get the info that it's a planet, a ga

I was trying to find a purchase or at least pre-order page for a specific laptop model. Top search result on Google was an Amazon link - an Amazon search page for that exact model, showing 0 results followed by the regular "you may also be interested in" links (most of which weren't even tangentially related to what I was looking for).

That's not all - get this. Google noted that it was recommending this because I had already visited the page

DuckDuckGo [duckduckgo.com] seems to, in general, return better results than Google has for me for awhile now. To me it feels like using Google in the early 2000s, actually, clean and generally bullshit-free.

The problem with google filled with search results (and ads) for google's search, just specific to a major site (ebay, amazon, etc) isn't new [1]. It's not even particularly distressing.

The problem is more likely due to model proliferation - why are there dozens if not hundreds of models of Asus laptops? Why will you only find a particular model at some stores? The problem is one of retailers protecting themselves from channel conflict (i.e., trying to avoid this scenario: browse store - find item, scan

The top result, at least for me, is this Amazon page [amazon.com], which has (again, for me, not sure if Amazon does "personalized" searches):Four other Asus laptops, including two of last year's G5x models, a similar business-class laptop, and a larger business-class laptopSeveral Asus laptop accessories - bags, car chargers, batteries - none of which is explicitly compatible with the G55A VGA Cable marked "for Asus

I've heard complaints that Suri is getting dumber over time. That for some people it used to return the results that they wanted, but now that it is building up its database of what (I'm guessing) a majority of people mean when they ask a question, that at least a minority of users no longer get the results they used to receive for the same query. If Suri gets overwhelmed by queries that can be considered in pop-culture terms to mean something other than their strict meanings, she could quickly become both useless and frustrating.

Siri's really just a slick interface to Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button, with pre-processing done prior to performing an actual search. Google pops up a map if it looks like you're talking about a location; it provides a definition if you ask for one, etc etc. Google already contains a lot of the AI-like characteristics shown by Siri.

Didn't even Wozniak say that Siri isn't as good as the advertisements?

Steve quoted on various news sites:

I have a lower success rate with Siri than I do with the voice built into the Android, and that bothers me. I’ll be saying, over and over again in my car, ‘Call the Lark Creek Steak House,’ and I can’t get it done. Then I pick up my Android, say the same thing, and it’s done. [...] On the 4S I can only do that when Siri can connect over the Internet. But many times it can’t connect. I’ve never had Android come back and say, ‘I can’t connect over the Internet. [...] Plus I get navigation. Android is way ahead on that.

There's nothing "Ultra Intelligent" in this kind of systems. My team built an equivalent to Siri, but oriented to web tasks. Believe me, there was little intelligence behind it. Most of the work is actually learning and relating tasks to sets of actions (this is grunt work and crowdsourcing produces great results at low cost). The conversation part is a no-brainer. If you provide a context, it's an even stupider agent: I trust it with my users and passwords so it can do boring/repetitive tasks I taught it to perform, and I never have to give him any additional context data unless my password has expired. And surprise surprise, there's no supercomputer involved.

These agents will never replace Google because they do different things. I wonder what Burrus was smoking when he wrote TFA...

A couple of months back my family and I were having a debate whether falling thirty feet would break your legs or kill you, so we asked Siri. She responded back with a list of buildings we could jump off in our area over thirty feet high.

A couple of months back my family and I were having a debate whether falling thirty feet would break your legs or kill you, so we asked Siri. She responded back with a list of buildings we could jump off in our area over thirty feet high.

I'm all for scientific tests... but ouch.

That's rich. Siri has no issues telling people to go jump off a building, but seems to have issues recommending an abortion clinic...

Hence phrases like "leveraging the cloud and supercomputing capabilities", and "ultra intelligent electronic agents". If anything, the smarts behind Siri comes from Wolfram Alpha, which is a question-answering system for factual questions. Most of the rest of what Siri does is just vertical search.

Years ago, a friend of mine worked for 'Ask Jeeves', which boasted natural language searches. It wasn't doing well in competition with other search engines; the assumption was that their natural language searches didn't work well enough to attract people to use it. My friend told me that, from their internal metrics, they knew that almost none of their users actually even tried to use natural language search terms; they just put in a few key words and hit "Go", just like they do with any other search engine.

Picking out the key words in a phrase to use for a search is a simple cognitive task that even small children can master, and it's actually easier than composing a complete, natural sentence. Most of a natural sentence is there to provide social context and cues about intentions that are irrelevant noise for a machine -- and often, we'd prefer to do without the extra work of providing that information.

This is the third incorrect syntax flame I've seen in as many minutes. Leverage has a meaning distinct from "use" Use means, well, use. "He used the razor and cut himself." Leverage means "use to your advantage." It has a distinct meaning that the word is unambiguous and clear in that use for that distinct meaning, thus not inappropriate, even if overused as a buzzword, with leveraging synergy and all. You'd never say "He leveraged the razor and cut himself" because that isn't using to his advantage,